This was highly entertaining: text adventure (Writer's Quest)

College Application Essays that Never Got Sent

I was cleaning out some old high school papers when I found this paper, as follows:

Create an acronym that represents your life. What is it, and what does it stand for?

BLARGH. B=braggart L=loser A=arrogant R=rude G=gloomy H=haughty

Imagine you are the offspring of any two famous people. Who are your parents, and what qualities have they passed on to you?

One of my parents is some famous writer. Yeah. The other one is a person. A famous person named Saddam Hussein. From the famous writer, I would get writing skills, and from Saddam Hussein, I would get power and such and such. I would produce propaganda that is capable of brainwashing the world and making all bow to my greatness.

Driving into downtown Chicago, there is a building visible from the Kennedy Expressway adorned with a mural of well-known Chicago personalities. If you could paint anything (other than your own likeness) on the building, what would it be, and why?

I would paint a piece of sushi, because it is yummy. It would look so real that sushi lovers from all over the world would try to eat it, but they would chip their teeth on the cement wall. Heh, fools.

In the spirit of Northwestern's trandition of collaborative learning, please provide us with an original essay topic or short statement you'd like to see on next year's application.

What is your name? and why is it ugly?
**The last part in red was added by my brother.

Notes

Morsels from my notes:

"K: She is a snarky, clever girl, but she has plenty of decency."
I love the word snarky. I love having a snarky character. I wish I were snarky.

As I struggle to figure out what the plot is:
"Plot? What plot?" (No, this is not that kind of story. Not at all. T_T)

Chapter 3 (done!)

Waaah. I don't know. I feel like Chapter 3 wasn't quite up to standards. I revised a tiny bit more today and then sent it to my prof and my other reader, but I don't know. I feel bad for sending a sub-par product because I know it could be better, somehow, but I'm just so sick of looking at it and blabbing on and on about how I'm going to get Chapter 3 finished. It's time to pack up and move on. I need to figure out what the rest of the story is about. And along the way, maybe I can pick up some actual writing and storytelling skills so that the next time around, I can make everything make sense and sound good.

Picking up a recent, modern novel like Snow Crash has made me realize just how much my writing sucks. *deflates* T_T

Chapter 3 (confusion)

The thing about Chapter 3 is that I keep rewriting what information H learns in this chapter and how/when she learns them. And that affects how she acts and interacts with K, their ensuing conversations, and so on. And the worst thing is, I've rewritten it so many times that I have trouble keeping straight what she knows at what point. I keep having to go back and reread to get into her head again, and that just stalls me terribly. Keeping notes might be a good idea.

Shrug

It's strange the things you end up researching. I keep falling making the fallacy of imposing our culture onto the one I'm writing about. If I want my character to show indifference, she shrugs. Only did she? I felt sure that I was imposing my own cultural norms onto hers. They didn't shrug in 17th century Japan, surely. So I went on Wikipedia and looked up the shrug gesture, and voila, it says that it's a Western thing and is "relatively absent from Eastern culture." As I thought. No shrugging. Yay for accuracy. Now I have to figure out if there's another (accurate) way to express the same sentiment nonverbally.

Sky

As far as description goes, I really like writing about the sky. It's usually only a sentence (because unless it's a really unusual sky, who really wants to read about the sky for more than a sentence?), but that's more than enough. There're a million different ways to describe the sky, based on the colors, time of day, and how you're feeling. I have trouble describing anything poetically, but at least with the sky, I try. It's pleasing to come up with a new way to describe the sky. I think my bias will be obvious once I get my story written. Chapter 3 has two sky descriptions so far.